History

San Francisco is a city that's famously full of instantly recognizable landmarks: from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Transamerica Pyramid, it’s easy for visitors to match many of our skyline’s star features with their guidebook descriptions. But for every Coit Tower or Alcatraz Island, there’s also an eye-catching oddity whose name might not spring so easily to mind.

Northern California's beautiful in any light, but it's hard to beat the glow of a great big silvery moon for ambience. This August, the moon will reach the closest point in its orbit of the Earth, giving us the eye-popping spectacle of an extra-large "super moon." Not in our lovely neck of the woods on August 10th this year?

There's art, seemingly, just about everywhere you look in San Francisco: from the Legion of Honor, MOMA, and the DeYoung Museum, to the large-scale street art of the Mission District, this city, you might say, was made to get the creative juices flowing.

Since the early days of the Gold Rush, San Francisco's given rise to an impressive cast of authors, poets, and literary game-changers. Some were born here; many made conscious decisions to relocate to the famously freethinking city; others simply took a liking to the place while passing through. But regardless of where they came from or how long they stayed, they all left their marks on the city in one way or another.

What do you call a man who's one part engineering genius, one part shrewd businessman, one part political influencer, and all public advocate? In San Francisco, we just call him Adolph Sutro, and he's the subject of the second post in our Stranger than Fiction series.

Once upon a time, in the City by the Bay, there lived a great emperor. He wore a long, Napoleonic coat topped with epaulets, carried a saber, and was saluted by an adoring public everywhere he went. He regularly attended governmental meetings, tried to abolish congress, and made written proclamations decrying everything from racial injustice to those who would dare call his city "Frisco."